A History of Britain, Volume 3 (35 page)

May your manufactures flourish; may your trade be extended; may your riches increase. May the works of your skill and the signs of your prosperity meet me in the furthest regions of the East and give me fresh cause to be proud of the intelligence, the industry and the spirit of my constituency.

Macaulay’s conviction that he could Make a Difference was the authentic ‘spirit of the age’ (a term that had just become popularized, not least by William Hazlitt). Arguably, Britain had never had a generation more determined to do what Viscount Palmerston (the great drum-beater of Britain’s global power) called ‘world bettering’. But ‘Clever Tom’ Macaulay had grown up with that impulse in the Clapham household of his evangelical parents, Zachary and Selina Macaulay, who had been ardent campaigners for the abolition of slavery. Between constant prayers and obligatory accounting for their time, he and his brothers and sisters had been inculcated with a driving need for self-justification. However jaunty a materialist Macaulay was to become (to the acute disappointment of his perfervid father), he never quite lost that early anxiety.

For Zachary it might have been worse. Tom might have become a Benthamite, for whom a human being was little more than a walking sense-receptor. Macaulay never did become a utilitarian, although in India he discovered that the utilitarians’ schemes of improvement generally ended up being improved by a strong dose of reality. But even when he had attacked the utilitarian philosopher James Mill for reducing men to machines, Macaulay was certainly aware of the attraction of the ‘political
economists’
and ‘philosophical radicals’ for all those who saw nothing wrong about trying to optimize pleasure and minimize pain. As far as Jeremy Bentham himself was concerned it would have been all very fine if, left to its own devices, the mass of humanity could find its own way to this golden mean. But self-evidently it needed help. And that help had to come from government; from exceptionally knowledgeable, disinterested men prepared to ascertain, scientifically, the causes of whatever particular social evil they were committed to correct. They should be zealous enough to investigate every aspect of the problem; draft their report and thrust it under the noses of whichever power could do something about it; generally make pests of themselves until the remedy became law; and then ensure that it was properly carried out through cadres of professional inspectors. The vision – even if never completely enacted – was a true turning point in British history, signalling the inadequacy of an older, more socially sentimental idea of aristocratic and ecclesiastical benevolence to deal with the modern industrial-imperial world of the 19th century. The squire, the justice of the peace and the parson would be replaced by the professional civil servant, the government’s blue-book statistician and the health inspector.

This is not to say that the ‘philosophical radicals’ wanted to burden society permanently with overbearing and expensive government. Their notion was, rather, to invest in enough initial investigatory zeal and intelligence to have society correct itself. There would be short-term pain, fiscal and social, in return for long-term, cost-efficient gain. But where the most conspicuous exercises in Benthamite social improvement were concerned – the New Poor Law of 1834 in particular – the pain seemed a lot more visible than the gain. Paradoxically, it took money to make the workhouses so horribly penal that even the desperate would not want to surrender themselves to them.

And in times of extreme economic distress like the 1840s in Britain, even the most ‘brutilitarian’ regime was preferable to starvation. The ebb and flow of the numbers in the workhouses, their critics rightly pointed out, was no index of true social misery; only of those moving in and out of the institutional walls. Very often, moreover, the reforms attracted the maximum of odium with the minimum of relief for the burdens of public administration. Even when, under the auspices of the arch-Benthamite in government, Edwin Chadwick, the utilitarian reformers did something as demonstrably benevolent as attempting to lower mortality rates in the towns and cities of Britain through cleaner water and piped sewage, their work ran into the ingrained suspicion, not to say hatred, of state busy-bodying that ran through all classes of the population.

That is why the colonies – swarming with chaos, sickness and violence – promised a more fruitful field for Benthamite idealism. In India, there was no tradition of bloody-minded liberty to get in the way of strong but necessary doses of Improvement. On the contrary, so the reformers believed, the crumbling of the Mughal Empire over the 18th and 19th centuries had left a subject population desperate to feel the strong hand of authority. ‘Happiness before freedom’ or ‘firm but impartial despotism’ was the working rubric of this generation. Utilitarianism had certainly had an impact on the teaching at Haileybury, the East India Company college established in Britain to educate the new generation of Indian civil administrators (of whom there were still only around 900 in the 1830s). But the people with whom Macaulay, as the fourth legal member of India’s Governor-General William Bentinck’s council, had to become acquainted were certainly not just tropical transplants of Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham’s principles, after all, presupposed universal laws governing human behaviour. But the British governors of India who had come of age in the first two decades of the 19th century had gained an early understanding that the difference between success and failure lay precisely in the degree to which general principles had to be adapted to local peculiarities. The young men who were borne aloft on their
palkhee gharee
litters, sweating in the dusty heat, their heads filled with Marcus Aurelius, the Indian
Rig Veda
and the arithmetic of millet yields, were Britain’s first true imperial soldier–scholars, equally at home with the sabre and the theodolite. Many had been young protégés of the exuberant, unapologetically expansionist Marquis of Wellesley. Some of them had graduated from, others had taught at, Wellesley’s college of Fort William in Calcutta, which had been established as the barracks of the empire of knowledge, created to reinforce the rule of the sword. Governor-General Richard Wellesley – in so many ways a more complicated figure than his much more famous younger brother, the Duke of Wellington – had not just been a gung-ho generalissimo. To govern the huge territories his armies had gained during the wars against the Indian allies of the French, he believed, would need men broadly and deeply versed in the topography, history, languages and culture of India. And his college was supposed to provide – through Brahmin teachers known as
munshis
– their initial instruction in Sanskrit, Hindustani, Persian (still the language of the Indian courts), Arabic and some of the vernacular tongues.

What got created – for a brief, dazzling generation during the first quarter of the 19th century – was a non-English British Indian government; perhaps the best the British ever made in Asia. Virtually all of its stars were Scots, Irish or Welsh. The most phenomenally knowledgeable
and
culturally tolerant of them were Scots like Sir Thomas Munro, Sir John Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone, and a little later James Thomason in the northwest provinces. All took to India the lessons of the Scottish enlightenment, especially the budding sociology of Adam Ferguson and John Millar, in which wise public action had to be grounded on deep local understanding. It was, in fact, just because so many of them felt that English government had so misunderstood and so mistreated their own country that as Britons they were determined not to repeat the mistake in Asia. Many of them became authorities on the minutiae of the history, law and agrarian economics of the territories under their rule. To act effectively meant knowing in depth the states and societies with which one was dealing. So Malcolm wrote extensively on the Sikhs, and published
The History of Persia
(1815). Elphinstone, who had fought with the Maratha princes, produced an encyclopedic
Report on the Territories Conquered from the Paishwa
(1821). And those writings were often strikingly free of the stereotypes about ‘anarchy’ that coloured the work of the later Victorians. Elphinstone’s
History of India
(1841) was at pains to portray Mughal rule as a golden age of peaceful relations between Muslims and Hindus.

Local knowledge changed the Scottish soldier-scholars. But it also forced them to face the contradictions of their position. On the one hand, the East India Company had promised that its bloody, disruptive campaigns were the precondition of establishing enough stability for a resurgent India (or at least Bengal, Bombay and Madras) to prosper. But somehow each campaign seemed to generate another. Pushing northwest into the Punjab to pre-empt the expansionism of the new enemy, Imperial Russia, brought them into collision with one of the few truly cohesive states of the region, the Sikh power of Ranjit Singh. Instead of creating a stable frontier the British engineered an unstable one, which in turn guaranteed even more military activity. It never stopped. It was always back to front. The nomadic horse troops of Rajasthan and the Deccan were declared ‘bandits’ – as indeed many of them were. But they had been turned into criminal predators by the relentless destruction by the British of their state patrons, the Marathas. Every intervention postponed, rather than hastened, the desperately wished-for moment of ‘settlement’. In the meantime there were soldiers to be paid – almost a quarter of a million of them by the 1830s, making the East India Company army (overwhelmingly made up of Indian soldiers, the sepoys) by far the biggest military force in Asia and one of the biggest in the world. That, in turn, meant that taxes had to be levied. The further hardship caused by those taxes generated more distress, hardship and anger.

Although local knowledge clouded the sunny optimism of the liberal vision of tutelage, it could at least do something about mitigating hardship. Thomas Munro had discovered that the
zemindar
– the middlemen with whom the government in Bengal had insisted the peasants make their assessment and pay their taxes were, far from being a tradition, more or less unknown in southeast India. James Thomason would believe the same was true for the Punjab. Those useful middlemen had simply interjected themselves with a blank cheque for extortion. Instead a
ryotwari
system, with every peasant settling directly with the officers of the government, was introduced, even though it presupposed a more or less complete land survey of every single holding, including data on the fertility of the soil and weather conditions experienced in the tax year. It was a monumental task (and only conceivable with the help of the same native agents who were the target of the paternalists’ criticism). But to do anything else, Munro, Thomason and the knowledge-harvesters argued, would be to betray their ‘trusteeship’.

In London, Macaulay is supposed to have dutifully plunged into the tomes, filling up his famously cavernous memory bank with details of salt evaporation in Gujarat or the niceties of caste. What he learned he almost certainly retained. But his heart was not in his homework. Too much knowledge of India, he thought, ran the risk of bewitching a healthily rational, liberal, progressive mind with the mumbo-jumbo of exotic culture. Although he had been a critic of James Mill he certainly read his influential
The History of British India
(1817), and, to those who objected that its author had never actually been to India, Macaulay would have endorsed Mill’s opinion that ‘whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India can be expressed in writing … a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could during the longest life by the use of his eyes and ears in India’. Besides, Macaulay had it on good advice that perfectly decent, sensible fellows went out there only to become infatuated with the erotic abominations of temple sculpture or bogged down, beyond hope of rescue, in senselessly elaborate attempts to codify Hindu law. As if any sound 19th-century administrator with a modicum of common sense could suppose that that was what India needed! What India needed was the crisp reasoning of Europe. Perhaps he would not have gone quite as far as Curzon, who in a characteristic outrage told an audience at Calcutta University that ‘truth is a Western concept’; but he would not have demurred either.

Macaulay’s prejudices were, to a great extent, shared by the Governor-General, William Bentinck, ‘the clipping Dutchman’ who had brought a dose of his own personal evangelicalism with him to Calcutta.
Bentinck
spoke, one visitor thought, like a Pennsylvania Quaker, and he certainly dressed like one in black broadcloth frock coats, in deliberately reproachful contrast to the flashier older generation’s fondness for Indian scarves and brocaded waistcoats. When its charter had been renewed in 1813, under evangelical pressure the Company had been made to open territories under its control to the penetration of ‘Western’ ideas – often a code phrase for the beginning of serious missionary activity. Whilst Bentinck was too prudent to lend his authority to something bound to stir up trouble he was also not shy of identifying ‘abominations’, the removal of which might pave the way for the reception of ‘enlightenment’. And lest he slide in this determination there was always Charles Trevelyan, his political secretary, to remind him of the call of duty. Trevelyan was the son of the Archdeacon of Taunton and had grown up full of uncoordinated zeal. The East India Company College at Haileybury, where he had been taught by the grimly brilliant economist the Reverend Thomas Malthus (an experience that would have a profound and terrible influence on his later career), had given Trevelyan’s civic anxiety direction and purpose. He had arrived in Delhi in 1827 at the age of 20 ardent with the kind of passions only Trevelyan’s generation could enthuse over: tariff reform, for example. When, a few years later, he pursued Macaulay’s sister Hannah, his courtship repartee (according to the admittedly possessive Tom) consisted of ‘steam navigation, the education of the natives, the equalization of the sugar duties, the substitution of the Roman for the Arabic alphabet. He is by no means as good a wooer as a financier … and he never read, I believe, a novel in all his life.’ Hannah accepted him all the same.